unknown music
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Posts posted by unknown music
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Most of the music software I like to use is proprietary as well, but I have managed to get this software working on the open source OS, so that is a step in the direction.
Gagarin Project reacted to this -
Hello psybient friends,
Please let me know if you are someone who likes to use open source audio editor or operating system to work on your music.
Personally, I like to use the Reaper software on a customized operating system (Arch Linux).
In order to make Reaper function on the unix-like operating system, the Wine package is used to run the program and VST plugin. To route the sound output, jack audio is used in combination with wineasio, qjackctl, cadence, ALSA, etc. This allows me to have extremely low latency and full usage of the typical ASIO output including MIDI. By recompiling the Linux kernel using special patch, it is possible to reconfigure the scheduler optimizer for audio purposes (instead of default server configuration). This way, latency can be reduced further for real-time purposes.
Now I have switched to this setup for almost a year already, it is the only setup I use now.
It works very well and I am very satisfied with the level of audio control I get.
Some of the newest VST plugins may not work, but most robust plugins designed in the past work excellently, 64bit or 32bit is your choice.
If anyone is considering a setup on alternative OS like GNU-Linux or BSD, I highly recommend to do it! The time has already been ripe!
Let me know your thoughts..
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Concept album that musically explores themes of space, plasma, electromagnetic, and fluid science ~Artist: Dream ScatterAlbum: Spectral RadiusType: mini-albumStyle tags: psychill, trance, chillout, downtempo, psybient, ambient, experimental, trip-hopMedia type: WEBYear: 2016Label: Crucial Flow ResearchCatalog ID: CFR009Length: 00:35:42official url: http://music.crucialflow.com/album/spectral-radius
Tracklist:- Geomagnetic Field (04:58)
- Plasma Stream (04:02)
- Orbital Transfer (03:37)
- Soliton Emergence (04:57)
- Residual Chaos (06:34)
- Escaped Electron (with JazzJet) (05:51)
- Vacuum Fluctuation (05:40)
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this is the problem with facebook, many interesting conversation happens, but then they dissapear .... i also remember seeing that post
I believe that could be my post you saw, I deleted it... but I summed up my general findings in my post here
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I do all of my audio processing at 64 bit and save them as 32 bit float. This is the best format to work in due to the higher numerical precision that your calculations will retain. If within your editing process you dither down to 24 or 16 bits all the time... then you are adding cumulative error, quantization noise, and dither noise to your mix and re-processing it at later stages with less precision. However, when storing a final work for distribution and no further changes are intended, dithering to 16 bits should be fine at the very last step (such as for CD). The reason I only upload 24bit files for my distributions is because for online streaming and mp3 conversion that many sites do, it is better to work with 24 bit or 32 bit files. This is because the mp3 algorithm works with 32 bit data regardless and will perform a bunch of more calculations. So if you convert to mp3 from a dithered 16 bit file, you are also introducing extra dithering noise and quantization noise into the filtering algorithms of the mp3 conversion.. due to the truncated data it is not going to be as numerically precise. This is why it's always better to directly convert to mp3 from either 32bit float or 24 bit files. For websites like bandcamp and spotify and soundcloud, etc, I always work with 24 bit so that I get the highest probability of having a good quality mp3 stream due to this reason. I don't know what format people prefer to download but the way I see it, I want to deliver the most exact sonic waveform possible.
On a side note, I don't believe in storing audio data at a higher sampling frequency than 44.1khz or 48 khz but I do perform most of my calculations with 512x over sampling to avoid high frequency phase distortion...
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In the start, I used to listen to much "underground" hip-hop music, so I've always had an appreciation for beats. Years ago I used to hang out with bboys in my area and we predominantly listened to soul and funk music from the 60s and 70s, especially breakbeat music. Later when I got into electronic music, I discovered psy-trance and was very interested in the melodic madness going on but could never understand why the beats had to be so regular and boring. When I discovered jungle, drum & bass, hardstep, darkstep, IDM, etc I wondered why nobody was mixing all those elements together with trance, I checked out many, many dnb artists from all periods. Then later on when I discovered ambient I realized that all these elements are necessary together and so I got into psychill, encompassing also the drum & bass origins I am interested in as well as the idea of beatless and ambient music.
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When I become satisfied with an audio track arrangement or with an effect plugin, I render the individual tracks to audio files so that I always have material recorded as audio to fall back on for future situations. This saves CPU and buffer time and enables me to try out non-linear editing/playback behavior. If I need to make any changes, I can always regenerate it with new results. This is useful once projects reach a certain size and the arrangement begins to fall into place... the mixing and mastering begins.
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making a living off of music is really difficult in my experience... especially with this music scene. nobody taught me anything, every chance I could get I learned more and did experiments and tried to figure things out. I happen to have spent many years working on my craft and over time I've built up my music and worked on projects for free to learn and to hope to gain more experience so that I can make a living out of it someday in the future, when momentum builds up. my goal is to try to turn it into a business but I'm still in the early phases of it. however, I don't believe that making money should be the primary goal when expressing oneself, but if people believe in it and want to support it, that's always a plus... the primary goal is to learn and reflect, stay true to the music and what you want to emit
what's most important to me is the sound and the message of the music
I don't know where this life will lead me in the near future but I just simply go one step at a time..
Gagarin Project reacted to this -
On its own, the number appears to be meaningless. However, upon closer examination, the 432 hz tuning actually does seem to be more " in tune with the universe " if used along with the Pythagorean system of tuning, which defines a set of frequency ratios related to a non-linear progression of square-cubic numbers.. According to my research, these ratios are naturally very in tune with the way the human ear perceives sound and music and also is related to astronomical cycles..
In fact, as far as I can tell, it turns out that the 440 hz reference frequency has no mathematical basis and is therefore the completely arbitrary number here
Instead of philosophically discussing it though, I think the best thing to do is to listen to some music on youtube or at home and decide for yourself
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As soon as I discovered Carbon Based Lifeforms I instantly acquired a new taste for music of this type. I especially like "The Path" and "Hydroponic Garden".
They have been a huge inspiration for my own drive to make music ever since...
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I also forgot to mention that the recommended loudness relative to full scale using the EBU R-128 loudness normalization is -23 db. The reason for this is so that music, movies, commercials, and just about any other material can be played together at the same loudness without having to worry too much about how much head room you have. This is so that highly dynamic content can be played along side with squashed/compressed audio, including movies; without having to fiddle with the volume knob between songs, movies, commercials, etc. For music it's only about necessary to go to about -16.5 db in my experience, and also leaving a 1db peak limited headroom and resulting in -15.5 db of average loudness to peak range... it's a good compromise, if it checks out with the material
it is always best to work at -23 (not have to worry about headroom), have your reference speakers calibrated to that sound pressure level too, then when you make the final "master" of the mix you can pull up the loudness to an acceptable level (perhaps -16.5 ish) and put the peak limiter
of course, you'd also want to make sure to set the level so that you can keep a transparent sound, instead of pushing all the tracks near 0db, pull back, because mp3 conversion for online streaming is going to alter the peaks of the recording and you may get distortion. that's why it's recommended to put a peak limiter at -1 db tru peak
I don't know if you'd consider it mastering or not, or what you'd call it, essentially all I'm recommending is to work at a low volume with lots of headroom and then to to adjust the entire mix in loudness to the desired peak level and slap the limiter on top for safety ~ I consider this an approach to mastering (in final stages)
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the past few years a very interesting discussion has emerged around loudness normalization. with the emergence of the EBU R-128 loudness normalization standard an official tool exists for measuring and quantifying the loudness of a an audio sequence relative to the digital full scale. originally meant for films, radio, and television; however musicians, DJs, and listeners ought not to neglect. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuEtQqC-Sqo
some media players work with replay gain and can utilize the EBU R-128 loudness standard for analysis. when the mp3 stream or audio file gets played back, it is first multiplied by the embedded gain and then re-truncated
this new standard uses a weighting curve determined by the sensitivity of human hearing at different sound pressure levels and frequencies
unfortunately, I do not know of any DJ software that incorporates it as of yet
my music is mastered with loudness normalization in mind as it can be disappointing when listening to excellent music that has been squashed in dynamics instead of being enhanced
in the past I have arranged a few DJ mixes before as well. when I look back at the mixes today I notice the lack of attention I had towards managing the relative loudness of the songs. today I pay much attention to loudness normalization and relative loudness using measurements and listening from the ear when mastering an album to attempt to reach an optimal sound level ~
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September 2014, Crucial Flow Research releases a double-mini-album-ep-set: Transient Phase & Side SpaceEssentially, listening to the two albums together in a row, starting with Transient Phase and ending with Side Space represents a sort of minimalist contemplative journey. It is minimalist because only a few basic thoughts are emphasized using carefully selected and edited speech, thus leaving much room for the listener to have his or her own subjective thoughts arise and mix in with Dream Scatter’s own vibrational energy. Listening to the two albums in a row is in essence a psychological journey that has been weaved together through a playing with resemblance and also distinctness among all of the sounds. This may allow people to form interesting connections between the music and their unconscious or developing thoughts. This is some music to imagine whatever you wish to and it could be useful for moving along thoughts and ideas. Projections of the listener, ideas, and understandings will make the experience different for everyone. Covering a full spectrum, ranging from positive and uplifting energy (Inversion) to psychotic and nerve-wracking (Neural Precipitate) to forward-moving and inspiring (Research Project) to mysterious and chilled-out (Morning Dew), these two mini-albums cover a diverse set of atmospheres ~Artist: Dream ScatterAlbum: Transient PhaseType: mini-albumStyle tags: psychill, trance, downtempo, breakbeat, experimental, trip-hopMedia type: WEBYear: 2014Label: Crucial Flow ResearchCatalog ID: CFR006Length: 00:34:54official url: crucialflow.com/research/archives/cfr006
Tracklist:- Solar Transformation (05:33)
- Temporal Lobe (with JazzJet) (05:10)
- Memory Implant (04:02)
- Flow Mechanics (03:33)
- Research Project (with JazzJet) (06:21)
- Inversion (with Paper Machetes) (03:50)
- R. P. Wackbard (Bonus) (06:21)
These songs are the more active part of the journey, composed using the audio styles of interest from explorations earlier that year. With Transient phase, Dream Scatter was interested in expressing multiple philosophies and thinking patterns, such as that society should always be evolving and changing and not be static, as with music. Things are always evolving and changing and yet staying the same in some way or another, stuck in a perpetual trance. This music is about capturing that notion. When a new idea or new sound or pattern of thinking hits the brain it makes the observer more curious and inquisitive, stirring things up. That’s what this is about. However, as with any stimulus, the perception of the meaning of the music will keep on evolving both in the artist’s mind and as well as with the listeners. In this mini album there was much exploring and developing of experimental composition, mixing, and mastering techniques; enabling him to map out editing steps into distinct categorical production phases. Process has allowed for a very selective expression during each step and helped with visualizing and filling in all of the categorical spaces into a full and well thought out experience. Listen ~Artist: Dream ScatterAlbum: Side SpaceType: mini-albumStyle tags: psychill, ambient, drone, abstract, leftfield, experimentalMedia type: WEBYear: 2014Label: Crucial Flow ResearchCatalog ID: CFR007Length: 00:38:02official url: crucialflow.com/research/archives/cfr007Tracklist:- Morning Dew (05:21)
- Rough Idea Park (05:10)
- Neural Precipitate (08:05)
- Nonlinear Recurrence (03:33)
- Wackbard Symmetry (06:21)
- Continue? (04:11)
- Mangrove Swamp (Bonus) (05:17)
Side Space is the extended reflection one can listen to in succession to the main album as part of the meditative journey to help reflect on and review some of the thoughts an individual may have had during the main tracks. This is due to their resemblance and corresponding order in relation to Transient Phase. Side Space is created using backwards, forwards, and varyingly slowed down, re-pitched, and remixed portions of the original tracks — mainly with the aim of getting a much more laid back and less active sound. Side Space is what someone might listen to alone off to the side in an alternate musical and mental place. The title implies being off from the mainstream, to the side, a space to be explored away from the tumult and chaos of society; a glimpse into alternate possibilities ~These two albums are presented together here because if they are to be reviewed it would make sense to keep them combined as it is a 2-part album ~
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you are not the first to give a very positive feedback to Reaper. And what is incredible is really accessible price of 60 usd for a "discounted" licence.
yes, I think their whole design philosophy and licensing is just so agreeable and when I took the time to read the manual and settle in, it feels right
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I think a better question is 'what techniques are possible for achieving stereo sound?'
it is important then to understand stereophonic sound and phase space
- Panning - changes the volume balance from left and right signal, leaving the spectral phase correlation intact
- Delay - changes the milisecond timing of the left and right signal without affecting the panning or volume balance, altering the frequency response with what is effectively a comb filter
- Reverb - simulates stereo reverberation reflections from a room, there are various types (Convolution / Impulse Response, Algorithmic, Spring, etc), this alters the phase space
- Mid-Side Processing - using L+R and L-R signals it is possible to convert a stereo Left/Right signal into a stereo Mid/Side signal. From here, there are many possibilities, such as mid-side EQing or multiband-dynamics, effectively also giving you a modified stereo field, depending on what you do
- Interaural Time Difference - there are some interesting algorithms from NUGEN plugins for stereo phase correlation modification
- Experimentation - using my own experimentation I've created stereophonic signals by generating signals at 44.1 khz and 192 khz and summing them together in creative ways. This works well because of the high frequency distortions present in lower bandwidth spectral calculations, which can be used creatively if studied and understood
These are just a few points about stereo processing. I highly recommend studying what the nature of stereophonic sound is in order to manipulate it creatively.
Stereo effects have inherently to do with the similarity and phase correlation between the left and right signals, which is mostly achieved through shifts in phase by various stereo time-delay related effects.
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I started back in the days of FL Studio 7 through 10. Now I'm using Reaper for all my projects, all of my new dream scatter material is all fully made with Reaper. Used to think that FL Studio had me covered and it served me really well for a long time. It kinda became very natural for me and was easy to use and flow with. I never thought I'd use anything else until I started getting into reaper gradually and realized that so many of the limitations that held me back in fl studio were solved in reaper. I'm forever reaper now.
I've given a shot at Cubase and Ableton and a few others but none of them really felt right with me as FL Studio did and Reaper does. Cubase is too slow and bulky for me, it's bloated like a new PC loaded with microsoft windows. Ableton just didn't suit my production style, but looks interesting for being able to play around live. I think it's ultimately up to you and how how you prefer to work and what sort of plugins you want to get bundled. FL Studio is a real nice way to start off and has a lot of creative possibilities especially for beat making. For me currently, FL Studio looks like a toy compared to Reaper; however, reaper doesn't come bundled with any instruments or vst plugins--which is okay for me as I prefer certain third party plugins. Reaper comes in a mere 9 mb download but provides an excellent fully customizable audio production environment, aside from the vst plugins.
Gagarin Project and IooN Cosmic Downtempo reacted to this -
For organizing my music library I use a modified version of the application foobar2000, as well as a bunch of other third party software for editing tags, converting audio formats, etc.
The folder structure goes somewhat like this [Genre] / [Album Artist] / [Year] - [Album Name] / [##] - [Track Name]
On Discogs and last.fm I look up a lot of the relevant information for the album, like release year, country, record label, album artwork, style tags, background info (so that it can all be searchable and easily identifiable). I follow certain structures, like if an album is a compilation album released by a label and no particular artist, I make the album artist the name of that label and group them together that way. For the genres and styles I use the modern id3 v2.4 standard, which is not widely supported but allows for multi-genre and multi-artist tagging. The first main categorical genre determines the genre folder it lands in. All the other genres and styles are stored as extra descriptors so that everything can be browsed and queried using foobar's wonderful adaptive and re-programmable user interface.
Using id3 v2.4 tags, I neatly write all this information to the files and adhere to a standard for the whole library and make sure that I have at least between 600x600 and 800x800 pixel size artwork
My modified version of foobar displays a waveform seekbar, allowing me to visualize the current listening position of the song super imposed on top of the peak waveform of the whole song. This gives me extra insight when studying the dynamics of music and instantly allows me to see how a recording was mastered. Also, there is a high quality VU (peak and rms) combined meter, loudness normalized around -18LUFS using the EBU-R128 loudness normalization algorithm. This meter gives me a relativistic perspective on peak and rms dynamics and mastering quality of a song. Aside from this I have a very large display of the album artwork for more visual contemplation as well as a real time stereo fourier transformation of the audio signal, allowing visual cortex analysis of the temporal stereo frequency spectrum changes in the music I am listening to.
Of course, I only listen to everything using ASIO soundcard drivers. The windows sound module alters and muddies up the sound as it is known to use weak resampling algorithms to mix multiple sources of audio together, myself and others have confirmed this through listening tests. When I listen through direct ASIO driver output I get more clear sonic quality and I can properly make out all of the finer details in recordings. Often times, I think most people don't realize that the difference between playing back a 24 bit lossles audio file and a decent quality mp3 file is negligible compared to the difference in sonic quality you get from switching to proper ASIO soundcard drivers. In other words, if you're not even using ASIO drivers, who cares if it's mp3 or wav? I say, make sure your digital signal processing chain and audio equipment is set up proper, then worry about which compression algorithms to use. In my experience, I am fairly happy with high quality mp3s for my music library; but of course I only work with at least 32 bit floating point wave files for all my serious audio editing work and do my calculations in 64 bit with 512x oversampling.
Using my knowledge of computers, mathematics, and programming, I have learned certain truths about computer digital audio over the years and combined all this knowledge into my customized workflow with audio applications to really allow me to study and appreciate music in all its details.
That's it for my music library. I have separate libraries for percussion hits, audio samples, recordings form portable recorder, etc. I primarily now use Reaper to compose, arrange, edit, mix, and master all my audio.
Reaper is like a swiss army knife for the studio work and foobar2000 makes an excellent music exploration and studying tool ~
ancientrealms and Gagarin Project reacted to this -
follow rabbit hole @ central nerve or discogs
all songs are streaming online on our wesbite and bandcamp
current official releases:
2011 - IC3BERG | Blastoff
2012 - IC3BERG | Deviation
2014 - Dream Scatter | Transient Phase
2014 - Dream Scatter | Side Space
2014 - Dream Scatter | Break Stream
2016 - Dream Scatter | Spectral Radius
upcoming: in 2017?
Dream Scatter | Cultivation Theory
Dream Scatter | (un-named album)
Please feel free to respond to my music and I am interested in collaborations and networking with similar minded individuals //
Crucial Flow Research is available for hire, Composing, Mixing, Mastering, Album Artwork, and Digital Artistic Expression ~
Gagarin Project and BEAT D FENDER reacted to this
Do you use Open Source DAW or OS for music?
in Technical: Equipment and Software
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In my setup, I am using the windows variant of VST. The *wine* package allows me to run the Windows 64 bit version of Reaper from a virtual drive / folder. Just as in windows, the Reaper program can scan folder for VST plugin (*.dll format plus any additional data). Most VST plugin should work, some special ones will require installation of a so called "winetricks" package. If a plugin also requires directx or other very special modern windows OS feature, plugin may not work yet.
Most of my favorite VST i have tested 32 bit and 64 bit and they work fine, only important one I cant use is Arturia. Older versions of the Arturia plugins work fine, newest version has glitches on this setup.
Don't know if it is possible to use Mac OS X variant on it.